Scientific Method —

The NASA Missions: When we left Earth

As part of the celebration of NASA's 50th anniversary, the Discovery channel …

This is a bit of a public service announcement (not to be construed with an advertisement) about a television documentary that will begin showing this weekend. As part of NASA's 50th anniversary, the Discovery channel will be airing a six-part documentary titled "The NASA Missions: When We Left Earth."

Space seems to be one of the more popular topics among NI readers, so I thought people would appreciate the heads up about this. I am sure that anyone who has a strong interest in space has seen many of the docudramas that have been released detailing the origins and early days of the space program—The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and From the Earth to the Moon. The NASA Missions is different, as it is set to tell the story using NASA's own footage, not something made on a Hollywood sound stage (cue Moon landing conspiracy theories here). The previews boast that the footage has been digitized and will be broadcast in High Definition for the first time. The show will begin airing Sunday, June 8th, at 9pm on the Discovery Channel and on Discovery Channel HD. Frankly, if they do half as good of a job with this as they did with Planet Earth, it should turn out to be quite a treat for the space enthusiast.

Matt Ford
Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems. Emailzeotherm@gmail.com//Twitter@zeotherm